Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 12.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

Colonel Z. Davis, of Charleston, S. C., desires the Roster of the Cavalry Corps corrected to read as follows:

Butler's Division, Major-General M. C. Butler; Dunevant's Brigade, Brigadier-General John Dunevant; Fourth South Carolina, Colonel B. H. Rutledge; Fifth South Carolina, Lieutenant-Colonel R. J. Jeffards; Sixth South Carolina, Colonel H. K. Aiken.

‘The Third South Carolina Cavalry, Colonel Colcock, was never in Virginia, or in Butler's Brigade. General Dunevant was killed October I, 1864, and Lieutenant-Colonel Jeffards October 27, 1864, from which time I had the honor of commanding the Fifth.’

is the ‘Eclectic history of the United States’ A fit book to be taught in Southern schools?—This is a book written by Miss M. E. Thalheimer, and published by the enterprising house of Van Antwerp, Bragg & Co., Cincinnati and New York. Its friends claim for it great fairness in its narrative, and that it is non-partizan in its treatment of sectional questions. It certainly does not call the Southern people ‘rebels’ or ‘traitors’; pays an occasional tribute to the skill of our leaders and the bravery of our troops; and so ingeniously hides its poison that Confederate soldiers, or their sons, are acting as agents for its dissemination, and many school boards and teachers at the South are adopting it as a text-book in their schools. It being one of the books of the famous ‘Eclectic Series,’ of which the late Dr. W. H. McGuffey, of the University of Virginia, prepared the Readers and Spellers, many of our schools are innocently adopting it, without due examination, under the impression that it is as unobjectionable as other books of this series.

In addition to this all of the wealth, experience, power and influence of this great Publishing House are thrown into the scale, and the result is that this book is being commended by some whom we would expect to give ‘a clearer note’ in the cause of truth, and is being adopted by teachers of whom we would expect better guidance for the children committed to their charge.

We propose to review this ‘History’ in a series of papers in which we shall show that, (however pure may be the motives of author, publishers, agents, school boards or teachers who have adopted it) the book itself is full of errors, misrepresentations, false statements, partisan coloring and false teachings—that it exalts the North at the expense of the South—that it misrepresents the character, motives, principles and deeds of our Confederate Government, leaders, soldiers, and people—and that if our children are to learn their ‘History’ from this libel upon the truth they will grow up to despise the land and cause which their fathers loved, and for which they freely risked, and many of them gladly gave up, their lives.